With CBI director Ranjit Sinha today admitting in the supreme court that the investigating agency made changes in its probe report on the coal block allocation scam at the behest of law minister Ashwani Kumar and attorney general GE Vahanvati, anchors and opposition leaders for Monday night’s news debates on different TV channels are already sharpening the pitch of their sermons.

Read Sinha’s nine-page affidavit: attached below

But a bigger point is, should the apex court now take suo motu cognizance of some of CBI’s earlier investigations and call the directors at the time to swear on record that they did/did not show the report to ministers and officials at the time, regardless of the nature of vetting?

The government and its law officers have stated they did no wrong in the ongoing case, suggesting that they sought no changes. There is also an argument being bandied about by the government that the law minister saw the draft report on the coal allocation scam only to fix typographical and grammatical mistakes. But Sinha’s nine-page affidavit submitted to the apex court on Monday clearly says that most changes done by CBI officers were on suggestions by Vahanvati and Ashwani Kumar, besides joint secretary in the prime minister’s office (PMO) Shatrughan Singh.

According to Sinha’s affidavit, Shatrughan Singh and AK Bhalla, joint secretary in the coal ministry, met in the chamber of the CBI joint director at the request of the PMO officer, and that draft status report of the probe was shared with the political executive and the AG, not the status report.

The affidavit, though, adds that despite entering the changes sought by these officials, the report neither altered its central theme nor shifted the focus of the probe in any manner. It also states that no names of suspect or accused were removed from the status report, and no suspect or accused was let off in the process.

Now, if meeting CBI’s top officers and getting a chance to see and allegedly vet reports marking the status of ongoing probes against the government is so easy — Sinha’s affidavit suggests it’s a breeze if you know how to use your office and work your phone — will one be accused of spreading canards against the government for suggesting that the same fate might have confronted the status reports of the CBI’s probes into 2G, Commonwealth Games, the Agusta Westland chopper and other scams?

And if that manages to walk past the sedition barrier, here’s a job at ambling past the contempt barricade: how about the supreme court taking note of all these to find out how genuinely impartial these investigations were?

It might just open a can of worms, seamier and stickier than the one unraveling the UPA’s handling of CBI and other ‘autonomous’ bodies.